Industry

Health Sciences, Pharmaceuticals & Devices

As the health services sector continues, it has attracted the attention of the organized plaintiffs’ bar and its backers in litigation financing. Drawn by the broad distribution of medicines and their acknowledged adverse effects, the plaintiffs’ bar has effectively industrialized the generation, aggregation and prosecution of pharmaceutical and medical device claims. The challenge for health sciences companies is responding to these aggregated claims on multiple fronts that address the merits of the medical claims without prohibitive frictional costs and damage to the hard-earned respect of their brands.

Health information systems and computerized devices face challenges including privacy, uptime and resilience. Surgical and implanted devices, based upon the best current science and extensive testing, save and improve lives but can develop unforeseeable stability issues downstream.

Points to Consider for Health Services Providers

The following are issues that businesses operating in the health services space should consider:

Product liability claims – Mass pharmaceutical torts tend to migrate to national brand-name firms that may better reassure investors and a board than a boutique like ours, but we provide a cost-effective alternative for segments of mass pharma litigation, including serving as local counsel, counsel for indemnified downstream distributors and retailers, discovery counsel under the direction of national counsel, monitoring counsel, settlement counsel and counsel for smaller defendants who may not be driving the primary defense positions. We try cases for medical and surgical device makers where their best course is putting individual plaintiffs to their proofs. We untangle, explain and resolve complex information system and computerized device cases.

Insurance counseling – In the current atmosphere, health care product manufacturers and providers must often craft very sophisticated means of capturing, defining, allocating, and buffering their risk exposures. We help companies understand their risk landscape and the agreements needed to manage it. We help companies enforce those agreements when claims and disputes arise.

IP – We help businesses in the health services industry protect their products from copycats with intellectual property safeguards like patents, trademarks, copyrights, and licensing. Businesses may need to prosecute and defend IP infringement claims.

Employment – Health services businesses may have labor and employment disputes with employees, ranging from wage and hour issues to commission and termination disputes. We help companies avoid these disputes and, when they do arise, find the best path to equitable resolution.

If your business operates in the health services field, partner with a law firm that understands your business. Partner with the law firm of Littleton, Park, Joyce, Ughetta & Kelly.

News & Wins

A Littleton Park team led by partner Eric Goldberg and of counsel Bryon Friedman successfully obtained an order dismissing the contract claims in a third-party complaint against our healthcare client in New York state court. The third-party plaintiff, a medical diagnostic company, asserted claims against our client for contractual indemnity and breach of contract for failure to procure insurance in connection with the underlying personal injury lawsuit. The New York Supreme Court, Suffolk County, dismissed those contract counts under CPLR 3211(a)(1) because the contract at